The Cold War is a part of history now, and I can amuse my
grandchildren with stories of the air raid drills that occasionally interrupted
class in school. The sirens would scream, we would put down our pencils, file
out of classrooms, and crouch in the hallway, heads tucked under our arms. The
sense of fear was palpable.

I doubt our crouching in the halls would have saved us had
the missiles been launched. It wasn’t until much later that I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and realized the extent of the fear, the terror the
Communist regime unleashed for those caught behind the Iron Curtain. The Czars
had long used the wastes of Siberia as a dumping ground for criminals and other
undesirables. The Communists used updated surveillance techniques with a vastly
expanded secret police force until over the years millions of people were
shipped off the Gulag where they were used as slave labor. Millions perished in
the Siberian cold, the brutal living conditions of the camps, and the harsh
cruelty of the prison system.

In 1941, seven men escaped from a Siberian prison camp
into the surrounding forest during a blizzard. Three eventually made their way
south across to Siberia to Lake Baikal, then across the Mongolian desert and
into India. The film, directed by Peter Weir, is based on a memoir of such an
escape, though it is doubtful the story is true. Nevertheless we want it to be
true, and fictional or not The Way Back
is a celebration of human perseverance and dignity in a world of suffering and
oppression.

The Way Back is
a flawed film, so that too many details remain unexplained and the tension in
the story, namely their survival, is not always sufficient to propel the story.
Ed Harris is believable as Mr. Smith, the lone American in the party, though
Colin Farrell as the Russian thug, Valka, was never quite as convincing. Still,
it is a good film, and one that uncovers the heart of what it means to be
human. The cinematography by Russell Boyd is very strong, and background shots
of forest, desert, mountains, and all extremes of weather lend life and
plausibility to the enormous struggle to survive that unfolds on the screen.

So, I understand why The
Way Back did not do well at the box office, though I hope those who love
film will see it now. Those who love film, and those who love creative
expressions of the human spirit, irrepressible and unwilling finally to accept
the notion that life is without purpose and hope, even when everything seems to
insist that it is.

The Way Back
(2010), U.S.A.; 133 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for violence and depictions of human
suffering).